A wide variety of types of solar collectors are known. Some of these include absorber plates with areas defined therebelow through which a transfer medium can be passed. Exemplary of this type of arrangement which includes a type of chamber structure are Safdari, U.S. Pat. No. 4,019,494; Stephens, U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,599 and Banet, U.S. Pat. No. 4,076,024. Safdari employs a blackened absorber plate that is provided with fins attached to its bottom surface. The plate and the fins are both spaced above a layer of insulation and defined an air space and it is alleged that the fins help improve the transfer to the air passing through the space defined between the absorber plate and the insulation layer. In Stephens, plastic sheets are connected together and serve to define a passageway through which water is pumped with the passageway including flow plates or baffles staggered throughout the area between the two plates so that water is forced to flow around them. In Banet, a closed liquid chamber is formed with the upper plate having a plurality of parallel, shallow grooves projecting downward toward the interior of the chamber and at spaced apart intervals the bottom plate is bonded to those shallow grooves by forming an upwardly extending recess in the bottom sheet which will meet the bottom of that shallow groove.
Other known collector structures employ a plurality of paths through which a transfer medium can flow with the pathways including baffle devices such as is shown in Skrivseth, U.S. Pat. No. 4,099,513 and Yu, U.S. Pat. No. 4,154,222.
In addition, other types of methods for helping dissipate heat energy being collected by an absorber plate are shown in Guertin, U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,593; Taylor, U.S. Pat. No. 4,016,861 and Schoenfelder, U.S. Pat. No. 3,863,621.